Search

This paper focuses on understanding how displaced people perceive dignity. In doing so, empirical evidence from the displaced Rohingyas from Myanmar, now living in Bangladeshi camps, and internally displaced persons (IDPs) in Afghanistan are contrasted with how dignity is being conceptualised in existing social science literature. In most traditional models or theories of dignity, one's lived experience is absent, ignored or presumed by the theorist. This paper demonstrates that the common and traditional approaches that ignore the importance, experience and perception of dignity (and loss of it) from the perspective of the 'victim' group are, in effect, engaging in an act of denial – imposing the view and perspective of the powerful on the experience of the vulnerable, denying their voice. Rohingyas in Bangladesh and IDPs in Afghanistan are presented as two interesting case studies in understanding and revisiting existing conceptualisations of dignity through a bottom-up approach. Arguments presented in this paper enable us to view dignity through the lens of the affected, vulnerable and victimised people. It is argued that, for effective and sustainable resolutions for these vulnerable groups, such a view can inform national, regional and international policymakers, allowing them to become conscious of dignity from the perspective of the displaced people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of increasing risk for aid workers, a growing body of scholarship is focused on risk management in contexts of humanitarian assistance and development work. Much less attention, however, has been given to how staff and volunteers experience such risks. This paper adopts a feminist geographical approach to explore how development workers make meaning of risk in specific contexts. Adopting a qualitative approach, it draws upon 14 semi-structured in-depth interviews with international (7) and local (7) staff of an international educational and sporting non-governmental organisation (NGO) in Afghanistan. After exploring differences between local and foreign staff perceptions of risk, it also offers a gendered analysis of risk for women development workers in Afghanistan. In so doing, this paper contributes to the growing body of literature in 'Aidland' studies by revealing the complex understandings of risk and fear by both foreign and local staff in the same geographical and organisational context. For NGOs seeking to make life-saving decisions based on the calculation of risk, this paper evidences the need to also create space for the voices of local and foreign staff whose experiences of risk will be highly relational, embodied, gendered and context specific. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Prevailing studies on illicit drug economies in violent contexts are typically concerned with whether illicit drugs are a driver of insecurity, or vice versa. This paper provides additional nuance to the literature by considering the interaction between different governance arrangements and the everyday life of people involved in the drug economy. Drawing from a systems-lifeworlds approach, we present evidence from interviews and life histories collected in four district case studies in two borderland provinces of Afghanistan. We find that governance in government-controlled areas tends to be more fragmented, negatively affecting the livelihoods of small-scale drug producers and traders. However, we also find exceptions to this trend, where stable governance arrangements emerged under state control. While authority tends to be less fragmented in Taliban-controlled districts, illicit drug producers fared much worse under Daesh rule, showing stark variation in the effects of insurgency rule on the drug economy. Contrary to prevailing assumptions that participants in the illicit drug economies thrive in ungoverned environments, our findings show that there is considerable, if selective, demand for predictable rule-based political authority, albeit pragmatic enough to allow an open-access illicit drug economy to operate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply-side interventions are often criticised for reducing illicit drug crop cultivation in one location only for it to rise in another: the balloon effect. The balloon effect is generally seen as an inevitable consequence of attempts to reduce opium and coca cultivation. In Afghanistan, there is little evidence of this causal relationship and limited acknowledgement of the socio-economic, political and environmental processes that govern access to the factors of production such as land and labour. This paper examines the settlement of former desert areas in southwestern Afghanistan. It shows how the encroachment on this land and the rapid expansion of opium production since 2003 were supported by affordable deep-well technology, collapsed controls on the use of what is officially government land and the relatively high price of opium that endured long after the demise of the Taliban prohibition of 2000–2001. Finally, it reveals that the rate of settlement of these areas was affected by an opium ban imposed across the Helmand Food Zone from 2008 to 2011 and shows how this drug control effort ultimately helped transform the province, bringing new land under permanent settlement and thereby increasing Helmand’s capacity to cultivate more opium poppy than ever before. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A certain, pathologised image of the Afghan man now dominates the mainstream Western imaginary. This article interrogates representations of Pashtun males in Anglophone media, arguing that these representations are embedded in an Orientalist, homo-nationalist framework. Through a specific focus on the construction of the Taliban as sexually deviant, (improperly) homosexual men, the paper underscores the tensions and contradictions inherent in the hegemonic narrative of ‘Pashtun sexuality’. It also revisits the debate about homosexuality as a ‘minority identity’, arguing that the act versus identity debate is deployed in this context simultaneously to make the Pashtun Other legible and to discredit his alternate ways of being. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Capitalism is not only an economic mode of production; it is also a form of life. This also applies to a historical type of capitalism, which is the capitalism founded on (illicit) drugs – in other words: narco-capitalism. The article discusses how capitalism alters life at the nexus of drug production, trade and consumption through a study of drug heartlands in Colombia, Afghanistan and Myanmar. What forms of life emerge under narco-capitalism? And how do people seek change and express agency in the exploitative conditions governed by narco-capital? To do so, the article proceeds through the following sections: first, it elucidates its definition of the 'everyday' as a conceptual and methodological scheme to understand capitalist forms of life. Then it uses material collected from people's everyday encounter with narco-capitalism in Afghanistan, Myanmar and Colombia to discuss mystification, predation and alienation. The article explores how capitalism produces forms of life that make use of drugs and narco-capital to dispossess and alienate collectivities. Finally, the article argues that to move beyond this alienating condition, drug wars and/or development are not a solution, because drugs are not the problem. Instead, it is people's organisation and world-building in dialectical mode to capitalist forms of life that can transform everyday life beyond predation and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, billions in aid money has been spent in highly insecure regions of conflict affected states in the hope that aid would lead to less violence and more stability. A recent wave of academic work on the impact of aid on violence has now amassed convincing empirical evidence that this hope is futile. Aid injected in highly insecure regions, where violence is a reality and insurgents retain some capacities, will increase, not dampen violence. This essay first provides a summary of the findings of the recent empirical literature. It then demonstrates that two causal mechanisms – predation and sabotage – explain why aid in highly insecure settings will likely lead to less, not more, stability. The essay then exemplifies these two causal mechanisms, using original qualitative and quantitative data from Afghanistan. It ends with a discussion of the implications for donors engaged in countries affected by conflict. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Part I of this article found that, in South Korea and Taiwan, institutional legacy and continuity as well as the politics of aid did matter for post-war state-building. The inheritance and continuity of Weberian states and the receipt of aid either as budget support or increasingly aligned with local priorities helped to foster state-building. Part II of the study in this article explores a different dynamic of post-war aid to Afghanistan and Iraq which had a legacy of neopatrimonial and weak states. It argues that under more adverse initial conditions - for a neopatrimonial state - the role of aid regime and state-building strategies become even more important. Under these conditions, aid and state-building strategies may undermine state-building if they induce discontinuity in the existing state capacity and create parallel institutions to those of the state. Depending on the policies, state weakness may be reinforced if leaders are preoccupied with the politics of patronage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the aftermath of the Arab uprisings Foreign Terrorist Fighters (FTFs) have emerged as a significant security challenge. Since the 1980s and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan the notion of a ‘foreign fighter’ has been closely linked, if not synonymous, with those ideologically or religiously motivated individuals who have travelled to join conflicts in Islamic lands. This article will explore the contemporary FTF movement, offering a comparison of Afghanistan in the 1980s and Syria in the contemporary period. It will explore the international community’s expansive responses to the challenge of FTFs, with special focus on the role of the United Nations. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Scholarly attempts to explain aid subversion in post-conflict contexts frame the challenge in terms of corrupt practices and transactions disconnected from local power struggles. Also, they assume a distinction between organised crime and the state. This comparative analysis of aid subversion in Colombia and Afghanistan reveals the limits of such an approach. Focusing on relations that anchor organised crime within local political, social and economic processes, we demonstrate that organised crime is dynamic, driven by multiple motives and endogenous to local power politics. Better understanding of governance arrangements around the organised crime–conflict nexus which enables aid subversion is therefore required. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The unsustainable aid dependency of war-torn countries – most of which are rich in natural resources – makes it imperative to start gradually replacing aid with foreign direct investment (fdi) and exports. This article identifies ways in which stakeholders – governments, the international community, including the UN development system, foreign investors, and local communities – could work together in a ‘win-win’ situation. Most crucial is avoiding conflict-insensitive policies that fuel discord by putting governments and foreign companies, often from emerging markets, in direct confrontation with local communities. The control of natural resources is often a root cause of conflict, and the latter’s exploitation can become a major challenge as wars end. The peculiarities of war-torn countries are discussed along with the specific impediments to attractingfdiinto the exploitation of natural resources. An effective and fair legal framework is necessary to ensure that investors do not operate as ‘enclaves’, creating new conflicts. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]